Good evening. How wonderful to see you here. My name is Jane Duncan and I'm the president of the RIBA.
Welcome. Welcome all to our celebration of the award of the 2017 Royal Gold Medal. to Paolo Mendes de Rocha.
Okay, forgive me for this. Buenas noches e bem-vindos. E maravilhoso hospedar a Don Paolo and Don Elena.
Thank you, Paolo and Elena, here at the RIBA. I was coached for six weeks to do that. I would also like to extend a special welcome to His Excellency Eduardo dos Santos, the Ambassador of Brazil, and his guests, Ana Maria Birenbach, the Deputy Head of the Embassy, and Haile Gedaya, the Cultural Attache, and his guest, Ana Paulo Pacheco. Welcome. This week in all parts of the UK the RIBA is celebrating the achievements and contributions to architecture of our new and existing fellows both international and honorary.
We've heard some brilliant presentations from the RIBA and the RIBA's and last night enjoyed a fantastic address by Peter St. John, the winner of last year's Sterling Prize for the wonderful Newport Street Gallery. And tonight, we celebrate. and hear from our Royal Gold Medalist, Paolo Mendes de Rocha, whose name you may have noticed on the way in, is now carved in stone here at Portland Place, alongside the 164 past recipients of the Royal Gold Medal, which was first presented in 1848. Tonight, of course, is all about our 165th recipient.
Along with Peter Cook, Sheila O'Donnell, Neil Gillespie and Victoria Thornton, I had the pleasure and privilege of chairing the honours committee for the 2017 nominations. Of course, selecting a recipient... of the Royal Gold Medal is at once a daunting but also an immensely rewarding task. The challenge and joy of immersing oneself in studying and reflecting upon the work of some of the greatest architects of our time.
He's fascinating, humbling, and hugely inspiring. Paolo's candidacy for the Royal Gold Medal was brilliantly championed by, amongst others, John McCaslin and Neil Gillespie, who are both here. If you will permit me, I would like to quote you, Neil.
His work has a courage and clarity that few can match. His structures are daring and joyous, His use of concrete bold and innovative. His plans at a building scale or at a city scale are generous and expansive.
He is passionate about people and society and how his buildings might serve them. These remarkable qualities are present even in his earliest works. There is a quality to his work that renders it timeless. For many he represents one of the last great figures in architecture whose work while serving society has a poetic dimension that delves deeply into our architectural discipline and from John McCaslin who supported Neil's nomination his architecture resists summary but it very often counter poises massive concrete formal elements with a relatively delicate transition of points of structure this in itself is not uncommon but the way Russia assembles the pieces in the geometry of his buildings remains unique.
His engineering intelligence has always equaled his full originality. Paulo Mendes de Araújo's particular genius may have originated in the 1950s, but he unquestionably remains an architect, and specifically not a star architect for our own times. This is surely...
the essential mark of his greatness. Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we have simultaneous translation of Paolo's lecture. Each of you, I hope, will have your headset and a small black box, which is the receiver.
If you do find that you have a problem with either the black box or the receiver, please put your hand up and a member of our team will come and find you and hopefully sort you out. We can only deal with problems of receivers, not in your personal lives. Make sure the receiver is switched on by pressing the silver button and that the headset is connected. To listen to Paolo's lecture in English, make sure the channel is set to position 1 by using the rocker switch on the right-hand side.
The volume control is on the left-hand side. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great honour, my great privilege to welcome Paolo Mendes de Rocha. APPLAUSE First of all, I'd like to say that we all feel like architects and we all feel Brazilians today.
It's a great honor. And we are very, very happy for being here, for being hosted by the RIBA here. To my friends. to all of you, my colleagues, His Excellency the Ambassador and Jane Duncan as well.
And I give you my sincere thanks and very humble hugs with this encounter. What I have to say is very little and it's very difficult in such a situation before so much knowledge. Once again, I'd like to say that although I may not be humble and I say again, I reiterate, I'm very, very happy because it's a way to see that my work our work, the individual's work, can have a very great importance in everything that mankind, men, want to achieve in larger dimensions, which is seen before us, this policy of sustaining life of men in the universe, everything we say about nature and all these issues, in order to be fair to this moment.
and follow all formalities, I will show you some examples that may have evolved since I began to think before I was an architect and even more when I became an architect. This fundamental question of building human habitat in nature because in itself, pure in its format, it's not habitable by men. And nowadays we can say amongst us here, with all due respect, without any intentions to make any jokes.
Nature in itself, it's hell. It's an equivalent to an inferno, to hell. We have an unstable planet.
The surface where we live is just a shell and we have these burning insides in the planet. The planet in itself is just a little rock, lost, floating space, submitted. ...to mechanical physics laws and mainly the consciousness, the awareness.
We have this universal knowledge on these issues. We know all that because us from the Americas, we can say 500 years ago, it was just yesterday. Galileo, who said more or less that things worked in that manner, he was burnt in front of everybody in a public square. Therefore, we're going through a revolution supported by knowledge, the construction of human habitats, cities.
this situation, scenarios where men can live. So this is the greatest question mark that architecture discusses. And this has great value if we think that when reviewing our successes, our mistakes in mankind's history, We could imagine that what we are living, experiencing currently is a critical view in a constructive meaning, not being critical per se, but it's a critical review of what we call colonialism, which was imposed on the Americas.
Therefore, the experience of the Americas, which has reflected in the Brazilian experience, actually has great importance on what we call Western knowledge, this Western culture. What news can I, South American and American, I can bring to this debate? I thought it would be very interesting as a Brazilian national, one of us, I, in this case here, I am bringing the latest news from... the Americas.
So the news from the front as the creator of the last Venice Bieno has mentioned, because now this is a universal fight. The world knows we are facing these issues. What have we done that we haven't achieved as a success?
And we are suffering from consequences from the last wars in the 20th century. And we are trying to come much closer to this political dimension of architecture as a very peculiar form of knowledge from its origins. It has a great importance in this revolution, in this process, in politics of this. revolution and it's revolutionary because it's global.
It's not just in the Americas. It's an issue that encompasses all of us, this critical view of colonialism. So together, We can think about the future and a vision for the future.
We know that we shouldn't say how things will have to be done. We shouldn't be absolutely sure of what we are going to do. We are always trying, experimenting, experimenting within this rationale, saying that we know very well what we shouldn't do.
what could create a mistake. We can forecast our mistakes, we can preview them. So this is a very interesting experience from the Americas, and that's what we are trying, that's what I am trying to bring to you as this form of news, and including myself receiving this award.
It's an experimentation in how to transform space. into something more timely in terms of how to inhabit our planet. These are very broad issues involving overpopulation, birth control, everything that affects sexuality. They are broad issues.
They are very broad dimensions of the individual. as a mentality, an individual mentality. Therefore, our main issue is to focus on contemporary cities and in order to approach... This contradiction between very broad horizons presented by these problems and very strict, very small resources.
So a body of work can be a dance, a symphony, architectural work, and they can mean so much in this universe. In Latin America, as a Brazilian, what I can say is that We've got a view, for instance, this criticism to colonialism is how areas are occupied. So countries located in Latin America, we can see this arbitrarity.
So Chile is there, Brazil is there, Uruguay. They're all positioned. in an erratic manner.
And within these erratic forms, we can think this very rich space area. We have the large rivers. Rio, River Paraná, Uruguay, the Plata Basin, the Amazon Basin, all these engineering projects that in Brazil we have dreamt about and we try to connect the...
Uruguay basin with the Amazon basin. So this connection of all these rivers in order to navigate them with Paraná and Uruguay to the silver river basin. So it would be like a hinterland coast for river navigation. This would be the key, the main point of possible progress in large areas as we... As we can see in the navigation of Mississippi River and rural as well in North America, the Volga Dome in the Soviet Union, we haven't been able to achieve that.
We should plan the territory in a more broad manner. However, it would be important to have this operation in order to bring countries together because some rivers, they... They are born in one country and the river mouth is in a different country.
So we could link countries together in order to bring peace to Latin America as well. Not even mentioning the Atlantic and the Pacific. They've never been connected. And once again, we should work together with several countries for these works. This means to connect.
connect these sides and also railways to connect these possible ports. And in the whole territory, we would have the need and the possibility together to make it possible river navigation and connection between the Atlantic and the Pacific. All the cities and new cities that could be born from these expansions, we would have the opportunity to connect these new ports.
cities and we wouldn't have experienced urban disasters. They wouldn't need to exist. So this is a position of architecture today. So cities with 20 million people that has occurred.
because people needed to migrate to find work. It was lack of planning and a very opportunistic attempt, which is a feature of colonialism, which has nothing to do with colonialism. nothing to do with the former colonial countries.
Today it's a global issue. France, which faces issues with Algeria, Spain, which faces issues with Morocco as well, and Holland, the Netherlands, Borneo, Sumatra, this issue is very broad. What we can do in order to manage the planet together in order to have a promising future that can really foster creativity and we can think about music, poetry, architecture, understanding before anything else that architecture is a form of discourse on knowledge and understanding the importance, the growing importance.
of architecture as a school, as a discipline, as part of the university, because architecture cannot have encompass all knowledge. It's impossible for someone to know engineering, philosophy, all humanity disciplines. Everything that is taken into consideration when one is creating a project, what we need to imagine is that architecture... by itself is a peculiar form of knowledge which can influence and intervene and direct all the university teachings and maybe it might be the most important degree in university in the future.
Therefore we need to review education policies and teaching policies from a very early stage of education. And with all these ideas, perhaps extraordinary, we could try to build a house, a very simple building. And inside this building, you have all this discourse. Now, I will show you a few projects with a presumption, if I may be able to say, because they may contain dealing with simple issues.
Everything, more or less, what we've discussed so far. And I wanted to show some projects in these images. Can you please show my PowerPoint?
I've brought my PowerPoint. Could you please? Is it from here that I control?
Yes? This is the Montevideo Bay. This is a very interesting city called Tietê City in the state of São Paulo. Why? This river, you can see to the left with the Atlantic at 700 meters high, and it runs west towards the Atlantic, and it meets...
Paraná River in the Plata base in Argentina. If you can imagine that they built a road, a motorway, with a collaboration with England in the railway system. And one to the south of Tietê River, which has never been used for navigation.
Now there are some dams, and it is possible. to navigate the river with these locks. And we can join railway system with rail line crossing the water dam, creating a system that would connect the previous communication system in order to have cargo and useful logistics with the river port. which would be located 400 kilometers from São Paulo, from Rio Paraná, and halfway through, 500 kilometers, it's the ideal distance to have jet flights and fly between São Paulo and Rio. Therefore, it's a very strategic location to have a city to connect all these systems.
Therefore, I... Architecture is capable to make even more virtuous an existing system with a small intervention and this intelligence to understand this space, the desired space in a logic manner, understanding the current situation men are experiencing. So this is a virtual city I've created and this is the scheme. It's a very simple city. with a horizontal line of 20 kilometers to have mass transport with all buildings, management buildings. It would be a city for 500,000 inhabitants, reaching 1 million inhabitants.
It's a very interesting proposal. side, we have an airport and a river port for heavy duty and heavy loads. And we've got a domestic port on the other side.
And on the other place, we have a port for heavy We have located a university to deal with polytechnic subjects and so forth and so on, with striking importance to what we knew and some interventions as well highlighted. We've got a maritime base as well, a hub for parks. a botanical park or a nature park, and on the other extreme to the right, we have this advanced hub for the Polytechnic and Sciences Maritime School. In the city center, it crosses what they call in Portugal a dam, a reservoir.
It flows to the river, so the city works in a horizontal manner, and all the sections that go towards the valley, the lower valleys, they've got gardens and green areas, and in the city you'd have theater, museums. entertainment. So this is a very interesting scheme.
It's a sculpture in iron with all these buildings I've just described to you. And here we have Montevideo Bay. It's a city built around a bay that we could imagine.
imagine a circular. But if we were to imagine spaces that were circular, a circle of about 2 and 1 half kilometers. If you know Sao Paulo, for those of you who know Sao It's the size of Avenida Paulista, Paulista Avenue, because size is very important for the rationale of architecture. It's not just an abstract scale.
What matters is the real size of something. So in this case of this bay of two and a half kilometers, we can see that the plan that is developed of an avenue that goes around the bay and cuts all the interior. and the access to these waters, and also the inconvenience of this bay. Now the architect can see this as a virtue and not an inconvenience, because the bay is very shallow, about two and a half meters only of depth. Only the right side is dredged for the city.
If you have boats for passengers, like in Portugal, that takes people from places, for example, in Rio, that we have the ferry boats, that takes people from Niterói. This could be perfectly developed here, this kind of navigation could be in these waters that are now virtuous, if we did it in the following way, transforming the bay in a square plaza. with vertical walls and with the material of the dredging of the bay, you could have extended plans that we could then we could have the hotels, the bars, maybe a school, etc. and the bay would be intensively navigable as a new form of transport and this is very much desired nowadays, such as the individual transport of cars. This is a vision of a car architecture capable to say, I wouldn't have to do anything else if this project would be carried out.
That would be the essence of architecture, is to know what to do and what... can be done in one way or the other. And I'm not ashamed to show this little detail. And if you see something in the middle of the bay, those are three or four stones, which is not necessarily an island, but could be transformed into a space with walls and dredged to make a theater, like a Greek theater maybe, in the middle of the bay.
where you could see beautiful stars at night with maybe a symphony, maybe even Amazonia of Villa-Lobos. This is the square plaza that you can see. because of the intense transit of traffic of airports, we can see this is not only nature per se.
It must be a man's work. This is the Brazilian Museum of Sculpture. And it's not only... although it's just a simple building for one purpose. It is a museum for sculpture.
But I imagine I could say that it seems to an architect that when you mention a sculpture, a museum of sculpture. like the fundamental museum, because as it is a sculpture museum, sculpture in an open-air space is very important, because we have so many examples of sculptures that, if were not in an open-air space, would not be so relevant. So architects sometimes create problems for themselves. So I don't... I don't believe that some walls that we have in many territories, that those are actually necessary, not even for a country, a colonized country.
It has an oppressive, a repressive idea, in any way you want to put it. If the avenue, this This avenue where this museum is situated is a corner of Alemanha Street that goes down for about four meters, if 100 meters in the front part of the plot, and the entrance of the museum is underground compared to the level of the street. In other words, we made the closed part of the museum an underground space. and the exhibition part on top.
And so the space as a whole is very interesting. And after it was built, this would make people say, well, there's no museum here, this is just a hole in the land. It's a hiding place.
And this is the joy, the joy to see the museum. to stimulate artwork. So I imagine that these pieces as instruments could come up as assessment and measurement, which is here shown on the sketch. If it's a sculpture, big or small, or where it is positioned, that makes this instrument, which is a beam, a vertical beam, a horizontal beam, sorry. serves as a meter to where to put the sculptures, in terms of height, in terms of distance of the axis, x or y, or also where to put the sculpture in terms of x or y, xs.
So the height is about two meters high, and that is the. height of my of my house so people will have the ability to and to comprehend the height of a certain sculpture because that would be similar to the height of their houses it is in direction of a street that comes from the north called Portugal Street and in terms of the other axis It is perpendicular to Europa Avenue, and that is where this fundamental piece to understand and to see this museum that is there apparently invisible. So then we have this part that provides shades with 20-meter pavilions, three of them for the construction to be. More simple, 20 meters is easy to overcome, theoretically, but 20 meters is very comfortable for...
exposed concrete and a pavilion of 20 per 50 is very good for exhibits and that's how we made this museum on the corner of Europe Avenue and Alemanha Street. Hee we have an inflection of this street, and there's a variable in the pavilions of 20 meters to be able to do this corner in the form of a trumpet to make a little musical analogy, where we have the auditorium and the museum plan. So the size of it was determined. determined by the businessmen that promoted all this project because of the money, the funds that they wanted to invest. And as we know in general in any place that we are, we know more or less how much the square meter will cost.
So we had a horizon of to be able to ask and to know how much the square meter will cost. how big this construction would be. And this was a very fundamental matter that we treated since the beginning. And this is the way we presented it. And it's important to remember, for those who like gardening, we asked a garden to be done by my friend Roberto Burlemarc.
And we have... We have been friends for a long time and that is how the museum was done. These are the cuts and of course this beam ended up having 70 meters per 12 transversally.
Of course it is made of shells, internal shells that are not not, but they are on walls. And they're separated from the other walls because this museum is underground. So with this new figure, we reached a different configuration. of the streets that are there that date back to the 20s.
But also with excavations of the underground, we touched something that was there for millions of years. And all of that is very significant in the perspective of transforming the place, which is a constant of what we should do in the future. an American territory that was so recently discovered through navigation and to which the contribution of England has been very important and also Portugal's contribution was fundamental.
Hee are some pictures. Of all of the museum, so the entrance, you cannot imagine that anything is underground. If someone passes by, they see just this part, so it's a new... occupation of space that this museum is formed.
And then we have the last project that I did. that was quite significant importance and was very important to me as a Brazilian because it was an invitation, not a competition from the Portuguese government, which made me a bit anxious because I didn't know if I should accept this project because the first contacts were very reserved. And I said, well, I'll go over and see it.
And when I got there, I said, I'm sorry. I will only do this museum if there is a local collaboration. Due to laws and influences, because it is a museum that is the most visited in Lisbon, called the Coach Museum, the Museum of Coaches, and it is a very touristic museum. place and attracts thousands of tourists. And it's close to the Geronimo convent near the building tower.
And that is where the three boats, ships left that are said to have discovered Brazil. And I think they probably did because we had never had any news that had happened before. But of course, in a colonial policy, which reminds us of the great destructions of a culture that was very strong and existed in the Pacific and that was destroyed. but that is very vast to comment here in this occasion, but it is a part of all this huge adventure of the construction of the spaces of America.
So to make this museum, the space was very peculiar in the front of the museum. We have the Teja River and we wanted to transform the place to make it more valuable in a sense, make it richer and more joyful. And this whole region is very visited, is visited by a lot of people. The square of... the governor of the Western Islands.
And it's good to remind, especially the young people, that some people don't know, most of us don't know, what to do. What is a museum of coaches, of carriages? What do we do with these objects that are sculpted with mermaids and with gold?
It's fantastic, stupendous. And we tried not to create any scenery, but to expose this treasure that is something that is absolutely fantastic in these big white halls so that they can be highlighted. Of course, you can't put a horse in the museum. But avoiding any idea of scenario, but to expose this treasure, the object itself, in a closed place, of course, with the right climate for it not to be deteriorated.
So we did this pavilion from the ground so that it had to be necessary. necessarily big, so we made it so it did not block the landscape, but in a way that it would flow in a very interesting way, because I said on the occasion that I would only do this with the support of Portugal. And this was done through the engineer Rui Furtado.
especially at the end of the matter, the zoological part with Nunez Sampaio. And they accepted my invitation. And going back to the beginning of my explanation about the Museum of Coaches, that only this way would I accept the project.
And they gave me much support, and that way we were able to execute this beautiful project. So the museum has been a great source of inspiration to me. has an exhibition part. And everything that is the management and variables that had to flow in this plant with rooms and small rooms, we put in an annex room because there was an irregularity in the land in the corner of two streets. of the two back streets where we fix this idea of an annex building because an annex in architecture is a very strong idea.
We all know that the baptistery is an annex, for example. Neymar made one for the. Because the annex The annex has the... Because from the window of the annex, you only see something else.
So it's always something else. And the annex, you see yourself. It's a dialogue that architecture is able to establish.
And it's very convenient, this idea of the annex. So we made this annex with a very high height. And...
This was to expose these beautiful gold artifacts, the coaches, against these white walls with 10 meters high. So the walls become a wonderful beam, especially if you imagine a metallical grid. So you could make this 20 meters transversal space.
You could make many pavilions. with 20 by 150. But it's very delicate matter to do this. And this suspension of the ground is amazing.
And then from the annex to the other building, we made a footbridge. And through this bridge, you had all employees in the museum. museum, going through the annex to the main building to open up for all visitors to show trains, carriages.
and these engines, therefore visitors, they enter the building through two large lifts, hosting up to 75 people each one, 115 total, creating for this engine, this virtual machine, which is the lift, being used in a virtual way in order to enable it to control the number of people in the museum. museum and doors they open up for those who are coming in or coming out. So the lift is always open because you open towards one side and enter towards a different side and we can see all the features we can use with the lift, especially the control with a very large, very visited museum.
This is very important. The museum has a controlled number of people that can only visit. So they need to make sure they have the right number of people and they can do that quite easily through the lifts.
So it's not just a simple lift, it's a means to resolve access, raising from the floor. And all workshops are located on the ground floor. You can see them. through the glass panels and there are maintenance workshops and fixing workshops as well. And we have a...
what we call crystal pavilion, crystal hall where the lifts are. And apart from that, you've got all these empty areas. And what's very interesting is that the government wants another bridge from the railway through the bank of the Teja River towards the bank at the front of the river where there's a river harbour. And it's not simply...
a separated development, but we wanted to connect the museum as well. And this footbridge, which would be seven meters high, would be developed within, from the annex, and halfway through the way you can see the auditorium, and so on and so forth. And here you can see this connection of the footbridge between the annex and the museum. For the back, We have this sculpture of the Vice King of the West Indies, the Western Indies. And here you can see the statue of the King of the West Indies.
You can see this internal passage. This is the annex where we placed the back office, restaurant, auditorium, school for children. And we created a very peculiar structure and my colleagues have collaborated. very well with me, especially Rui Furtado. He is a very...
interesting person, not just from the engineering perspective. And the roof with natural light and the auditorium, we've got a water mirror in order to show a respect for Tejo River. So this is all I had to say for today. And once again, I remind all of you that for me and to all of us, I'm very honored, I'm very happy. happy to be here in London, in the U.K.
to Brazilian people, Portuguese people. It was the English ships that brought the king and the queen from Portugal to build the first form of government in Brazil for this adventure called the South Americas with John VI, the king of Portugal, and later on building harbors, railway. So the......of Brazil, a participation and a fundamental contribution... These people, the English people, they were very fundamental.
They contributed to build Brazil. So England was very important to us. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you, Paolo, for that brilliant lecture.
It's been a great pleasure to hear you speak, and I look forward to presenting you tomorrow evening with the Royal Gold Medal on behalf of He Majesty the Queen. Ladies and gentlemen, please show your appreciation once more to our wonderful Royal Gold Medalist, Paolo Mendes de Rocha. Thank you very much to the team behind tonight's event.
And also thank you very much to our main sponsors, ARPA, to our exclusive technology partner, Microsoft, and to our hotel partner, Le Meridian, and to our... partner Tetinger. Thank you also Ibstock Brick for supporting our Life by Design series.
Without your kind and generous support tonight's event and our programme of activity around the country would not have been possible. please now do join me and our medalist for drinks which are being served upstairs in the Florence Hall on the first floor but before you leave please can I ask you to leave your headset on your chair or hand it to a member of our team thank you all very much for coming thank you